Chicago Daily Observer

I had not intended to write another column about Barry “Not Goldwater” Obama, but events intervened and here we go again. Obama’s stumbling performance at the Saddleback Church necessitated this op-ed commentary. My original topic (Cook County mismanagement) will have to be tabled until another day.

Rather than admit that the presumptive Republican nominee, US Senator John McCain of Arizona, handed him his lunch after both candidates were interviewed by Pastor Rick Warren, the Obama camp cried foul and insisted that McCain had not been isolated in “the cone of silence” during Obama’s individual interview and thereby benefited by knowing Obama’s responses in advance. Given Obama’s clumsy and stuttering performance, I find it difficult to believe that McCain could have possibly learned anything of value by listening to the junior senator from Illinois. What exactly is this “cone of silence” business anyway? Is this a presidential campaign or a television ... Read More...

My father, an All-American football player in college and a professional coach later, could never totally commit to the Olympics after they went professional. (You don’t think they’re professional? You thought you were watching Kobe Bryant on another channel?)

My dad looked on sports as training fields for living rather than grand slams for sponsor endorsements. (Nor did he think the players should be the sole pride of cities after they become high-paid gladiators. But we’ll get to that later.)

I really don’t know what he would have thought of the tiny, grim-faced girls hurtling themselves into knots this week in China. (We’re now discovering that they’re what? Ten years old?). I think he might have suggested – as I do – that there is a kind of child abuse involved here.

My father would have remembered names like Jesse Owens and Jim Thorpe and the real pride of watching ... Read More...

Stanley Kurtz suspects that the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is playing down his ties to the radical left. The conservative scholar just can’t prove it.

That’s because the University of Illinois at Chicago, which houses the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge — a defunct education foundation with ties to both Mr. Obama and the former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers — won’t let him see the papers.

The University of Illinois has refused to release records related to Sen. Barack Obama’s service for a nonprofit educational project that put him in contact with activist William Ayers, a 1960s-era radical and now education professor.

The university’s Chicago campus maintains that the donor of the records that document the work of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge has not handed over ownership rights. The university says it is “aggressively pursuing” an agreement with the donor, and as soon as an agreement is reached, the collection will be made accessible to the public. The university has not identified the donor.

The timing could have been better for Salem State College, in Salem, Massachusetts, 21 miles outside Boston. Or, who knows? Maybe the timing couldn’t be better.

The public university pays big bucks to big names for its 26-year-old lecture series. (Speakers have included former presidents—Carter, Bush I, Bill Clinton—major writers—Maya Angelou, Tom Wolfe—major media figures—Walter Cronkite, Thomas Friedman—activists—Jesse Jackson, Gloria Steinem.)

Democrats don’t like it when you say that Barack Obama won his first election in 1996 by throwing all of his opponents off the ballot on technicalities.

By clearing out the incumbent and the others in his first Democratic primary for state Senate, Mr. Obama did something that was neither illegal nor even uncommon. But Mr. Obama claims to represent something different from old-style politics—especially old-style Chicago politics. And the senator is embarrassed enough by what he did that he misrepresents it in the prologue of his political memoir, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Perverse monetary policy was the greatest cause of the Great Depression. But five non-monetary missteps were important in making the Depression great, and the same missteps damaged the global economy as well. While many are thinking about the Depression, few seem concerned about replicating these Foolish Five today:

· Giving in to protectionism. In Herbert Hoover’s time, Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. W.C. Hawley proposed a tariff that was to raise effective duties by as much as half. More than a thousand economists signed an open letter warning that the duties would “raise the cost of living and injure the great majority of our citizens.”

But Hoover’s Republican Party didn’t much care. In its 1928 platform, the GOP had pledged to “reaffirm our belief in the protective tariff.” Ambivalent, Hoover signed the bill. An irate Canada and many other nations retaliated. At a time when the United States was ... Read More...